Last Night Brian and I attended Vator Splash in San Francisco, the format was focused on Startups.  The attendees were mostly Founders and Venture Capitalists.  The format was two 1/2 hour bookend presentations by recent successes, Jeff Smith CEO of Smule (Ocarina App) and Mark Pincus CEO of Zynga (Farmville)  both were doing exciting things with the social aspects of new platforms like Facebook and the iPhone.  The middle of the night was filled up with 10 demo from fledgling startups.

It was a quick format with 3 minutes given to each startup, with one AND ONLY ONE, Robert Scoble, follow up question.  You can find out a lot about a startup in 3 minutes.  I was very impressed with the winner Tim Hyer Founder of RentCycle, who has the potential of capitalizing on economics and a growing desire to adapt our consumerism to more sustainable practices.  It's a great tie in with Tuesday's NY Tech Meetup, what will technology do for us in the next 10 years, while being a great business model at the same time.

Dana Settle, a principle in Greycroft, one of Crowd Fusion's investors, was on the splash panel to give feedback to the Event Cycle.  It's always good to see Dana's smile when I get to the left coast.  Mark Pincus was a surprisingly motivating speaker, he's dedicated to his craft and clearly perfection is not only strived for but demanded.  To be clear I despise every one of his apps that I have to block from my Facebook stream, it was good to hear he's looking to raise the bar and be more than the 'pet rock' of 2009.

In the demo pit I found a very exciting future tech.  Beam Energy from Power Beam Energy definitely check that out.  Thanks Bambi Francisco, Vator.tv, and all of the sponsors for a fun event.  Landing back in JFK in the middle of a snow storm signing off now.  

What is the future of NYC Technology companies?  Are we here to service the old gatekeepers?  Or are we going to build new companies that empower people to do great things?  Scott Heiferman put that question to an audience of 700 tonight in an FIT auditorium.  A number of do-gooders (Scott's label) proceded to challenge us technologists to do more than just produce another shopping app.  It's been awhile since I attended a NY Tech Meetup and I definitely need to make myself a regular.  

Majora Carter wants city planning tools that better show the value to citizens lives of green spaces.   She was particularly harsh on Sports Teams and public funding of stadiums.  It added a little perspective.  Clay Shirky left me thinking about why their is value in evaluating the profiles and dataset of friends of my friends.  I've alway been skeptical of Social Networks broadening your scope to larger connections as being self serving.  He left me wondering if I'm missing an important component of how my online neighborhoods can have value to me.  Clay repeated referenced a  study by Christakis and Fowler about influences in your larger circles.

Tony Bacigalupo (New Work City) predicted that the ways we work, and where we work will continue to evolve away from cubicles.  Look for Tony starting an impromptu BarCamp in a laundromat near you.  Ben Berkowitz showed new tools in ClickSeeFix to allow municipalities to customize Mobile Apps.  Jacqueline Novogratz showed how basic infrastructure changes lives.  

Congratulations to Andrew Rasiej, now chairman of the board for the NY Tech Meetup.  His anecdote of how NYC became the great city it is because of great infrastructure decisions (particularly clean fresh water) left me thinking about how important it is RIGHT NOW to wrench our public data out of the hands of the current gatekeepers. Andrew also criticized our local officials for not being transparent. Representatives from the MTA had to follow him with a feeble attempt to show how they were changing and attempting to embrace the mashup community.  

Rachel Sterne from GroundReport exposed a number of issues that need to be solved to make citizen journalism effective.   

1)  Writers get little to no revenue.  Technology can help them to produce more, higher quality content.

2)  Vetting Process has to evolve, I think reputation systems can help.

3)  Local news is decentralized and hard to find.  Better searching and sorting algorithms are needed.

4)  Advertorial content is everywhere.  The firehose has to be easier to filter.

5) .. Flash Headlines, Contrived Controversy ..  hmm -- not sure about this one.

The meeting on a whole was uplifting, to see people going against the cynicism and trying to make a difference does make you question what your contribution can be.  My takeaway is that Crowd Fusion has to focus on the ways that our platform empowers people to do more with less time and financial resources.  Specifically helping answer Rachel's issues (or at least 4 of them).

There seems to be a flurry of inquiries in my various email lists looking for top level web developers.  Every time I read the requirements (particularly LAMP) for top applicants I can quickly piece together what their infrastructure must look like.  All too frequently I cringe! 

Here's one: PHP5+, MySQL 5.1+, Smarty, HTML, XML/Feeds, TCP/IP communications, Socket connections, Shared Memory management, Linux, Apache, Perl, JavaScript.  

What we have here is a mix of common concepts every web developer should be familiar with, specific development architecture, and a host of coding languages, some of which need to be cutting edge.  I wonder what do the (+) signs mean?  Are these more important?  Are you looking for varients of MySQL 5.1? Or 5.2, would 6.0 count as 5.1+?

It is obvious to me that this organization got a ways into the development process and hit a wall, could be scalability, could be 'memory management'.   All too often startups get locked into believing that their prototype architecture has anything to do with their final product.  Find a good developer, consult with a GREAT architect and rebuild from scratch if you believe you've got an application that the world needs.

For the last three months we have been preparing Crowd Fusion in anticipation of an announcement that will put our framework in the hands of hundreds and hopefully thousands of developers and media companies. The timing was right, so we applied for TechCrunch 50 and were honored by the opportunity to present on stage and give this announcement.  Our framework, codename sprung, and Crowd Fusion CMS are now open source licensing.  For the next 6 to 8 weeks we'll be taking beta signups and working with developers who apply in preparation for a full public release.

Our core framework now uses Inversion of Control (IoC) and an event model to allow developers full access to the framework and easily extend it using plugins.  Layered on top of the framework is Crowd Fusion CMS, a set of plugins that give access to some core features we believe any web publishing venture needs.   News, Profiles, Media, Members and Comments are plugins in the Crowd Fusion CMS that give great examples of working with the framework and are easily extendable to accomplish unique implementations and applications.

There are many features we'll be writing about and exposing with our documentation, including a unique rendering engine, graph database implementation, robust tagging model, and much more.  There are many people to thank that helped us get to this milestone, specifically Ryan Scheuermann who was instrumental in the architectural design of our technology migration.   

Are you a hard core XHTML/CSS designer/developer looking to work collaboratively with a strong team of experts challenging and learning from each other daily while building the next big thing in web publishing?

Ideal candidate has superb skills in XHTML and CSS, a working knowledge of JavaScript, SVN, web design experience, and is comfortable with webpage templating principles.  

Crowd Fusion is an exciting virtual company, made up of people who love what they do, which relies heavily on strong communication skills and interactive tools like basecamp, campfire and email.   Contractor needs to be able to commit to 10-20 hours per week and be available at least half of these hours to collaborate with the Crowd Fusion development team.  Ideally available 2-3 days a week 4+ hours a day during EST work hours.

Send examples of your work, hourly contracting rate and resume to Craig Wood, Crowd Fusion CTO at craig (dot) wood [at] gmail (dot) com.

Virtual reality seems to be a completely played-out cliche as we approach the 2nd decade of the 21st century.  However augmented reality is here.  It is about to explode into the common culture with an intrusion that will make 70s NYC Subway graffiti seem tame.  I first started thinking about the possibilities after reading William Gibson describe locative art in Spook Country.  How appropriate for the visionary who brought us the harshest visions of cyberspace to be on the forefront of this new art form.

Augmented reality uses a computer and a camera to overlay digital items on top of reality.  The interaction with these items is only limited by the programmer's imagination.  Tonight, I had the two kids cut out patterned pieces of paper.  We sat in front of my laptop with the iSite on.  Holding up the patterned paper created over layed 'snowflakes' on our video stream and played different notes based on the which square was recognized.  Try this--you won't regret it. 

Once you've had some fun with this, if you are a paranoid cynic like me, you instantly see how this could proliferate out of control.  Don't see it?  Review the technology as used in advertising. Or Japanese Anime. Think about the player being on your cell phone, combine geo-location triggering with graphical triggering and everything in the current world could be over layed with multiple dimensions of art, games, or advertising.  It's spooky, sexy, exciting. It feels like that first time I saw the pacific ocean waves breaking real-time on a web camera in 1995.  The internet has only just begun to leave the prison of the computer and escape to our mobile devices. I can't wait to see what else the creative collective can do to entertain and enlighten us.

My parents are to blame for me being a geek.  When I was 11 my father bought me a Vic 20 that he had seen in a Computer Store while he was trying to sell IBM big iron.  I was so excited about having my very own basic compiler that they let me skip school to see if I could fill up the 3.5K with some bloated code.  

But, this was not their first attempt to thoroughly geekify me--3 or 4 years earlier I was handed an original Rubik's Cube and given the task of figuring it out.  Most of my friends had them, and most of them could get one or two sides solid then give up, deciding that playing on the playground or a pickup football game was more interesting.   Not me--I obsessed until it was finished.   I solved it a couple of times before I decided to study other people's solution books.  The next challenge would be to see how fast I could complete it.

I remember like it was yesterday, one Saturday morning at my bowling league, solving the cube while my teammates timed me.  One minute 10 seconds... I can do better.  55 Seconds.  One more try.  39 secs.  Looking back, I can't believe my hands moved that fast.  Unfortunately, my cube had gotten soft and routinely it would explode, throwing small square chunks of plastic all over the lanes and sending young children scurrying to find them. 

This was the moment Justin walked by, "No one can solve that".   Justin had a hook, and led the league with an average around 200.  The gauntlet was thrown, how could I respond? "Wanna bet?"  The question came from somewhere buried deep.  "Yeah sure, 50 cents says you can't do it," Justin responds.  My fingers fly into action - colors whirling, one side down.  Now all the corners finished.  Filling in the top and bottom.  Now the Rubik's maneuver.  Wait!  Arggh!  I had put the broken puzzle together with one piece inverted.  I couldn't convince Justin that a single piece couldn't be flipped by anything other than taking it apart and physically flipping it.

I lost the bet, but learned a great lesson about preparation.  It still amazes me that people think the Rubik's Cube is some great mystery and that you must be an astro physicist to solve it like Neil Degrasse Tyson on Jon Stewart's show.   I still have one kicking around the house and will bring it out to dazzle friends.  I can no longer solve it in less than a minute, and no one takes my bets.

I have to admit it is hard to miss New York when my memories of leaving 4 days ago are snow covered highways and waiting in an airplane while being covered with a thousands gallons of antifreeze. I am anxious to get back this evening, we've had a remarkably productive trip.  Crowd Fusion is being well received by everyone that we've shown it to.  Jason and Jade have been superbly gracious. I've been bowling more times in the last 4 days than the previous 4 years.   The Mahalo tech team was in town, and well met.

This morning we were promised bagels as good as New York, right here in LA.  I've been disappointed by that line throughout the world, so I instead chose huevos rancheros, possibly the best meal of the trip.   Besides the great eggs breakfast conversation was lively with a chance meeting of Miles Beckett of lonelygirl15 fame.   You can trip over an internet celebrity just about anywhere these days, but I'm pretty sure the density is significantly greater here.

 UPDATE: Brian Alvey posted the video of an ever so insightful round table discussion on Vimeo.

It is very common for me to hear 'Rock Star' or 'Super Star' used to describe the top programmers in the computer science field.  I use it myself when posting want ads and like the idea of these sought after individuals with talents that put everyone else to shame.  But let's analyze this.  My thesis is that almost none of the coding elite would want that lifestyle.

All the world's a stage

Rock Stars love the limelight, the cheering adoring fans with every eye fixed on every detail, the hair, the wardrobe.  Excellent Coders, we crave quiet spaces where we can dress comfortably, enter a private world and interact minimally with the rest of the world.

New cities and towns.

A Rock Stars' life is a new hotel room every night, buses, seeing new towns.  Lots of people like to travel, but resettling every night, finding a good source of pizza and coffee, the lack of a comfortable chair, etc.  These are not things craved by Excellent Coders.

Everyone's a critic.

The struggle between art and popularity brings drama and excitement to the Rock Star.  Code review and collaborative creation are the source of inspiration for an Excellent Coder.

Rock-n-roll all night and party every day.

Everyone loves a good parry and I've been to some great ones at SXSW, but partying like there will be no tomorrow is just not a skill that Excellent Coders will list on their resume.

I think it's time to find a new term for the coding elite. I've heard Coding Jedi thrown around but it just hasn't taken.   I'm looking to hire some great coders, help me find the right words to describe them.

When it comes to inside the beltway politics, I am a cynic.  The two party system is a charade designed to keep real change far away from the business of governing.  It seems that to get to power you have to make so many agreements with so many crooks and liars that the agenda is already set.  HOWEVER, I'm trying to be audacious, I'm striving to hope.

I didn't watch the Inauguration speech, I watched the people, who watched Obama.   They've been empowered, they feel like they can make a difference.  Grass roots community activism can work.  These newly empowered voters need to not lose hope when help is slow to come from Washington.

My biggest hope is for our planet.   We don't need anything but a strong leader with a stronger message to mobilize the masses towards a lifestyle of cohabitation with our planet.  I cheered when Barack Obama stated, "Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet". 

I'm trying to do my part, so along with the Crowd Fusion team, I'm please to announce that we've launched Super Eco to help educate people on the little things you can do every day to make a difference.  Super Eco will help dispel the Eco myths,  show why reading labels matters, and give a voice to the people offering solutions.  Join the movement, tell us how we can help, and become part of the Super Eco community.

Someday I'll be a good enough blogger that I'll have 4+ blogs like my dear friend Judith Meskill 1 2 3 4.   When I do it will be easy to keep friends, family, work, hobbies, and weekend projects all in different streams for different audiences.  For now, I'm going to break an unwritten rule and tell the world how cute my kids are - very cute.  

I'm not sure where from, but sometime back in December, Carrie dug up a truely old skool Star Wars T-shirt for our 2 year old.   We both got a kick out of it, but had no idea the memories it would create.   During the holidays, I wanted to test my son's ability to get his grandfather's attention and put the T-shirt on him with instructions to go show it to Grandpa.  To my surprise he stuck out his chest and proudly pointed to the characters for my dad.  They proceeded to have an involved conversation about the empire and the force.

After a couple weeks of the t-shirt going in every wash and Owen pointing proudly to CHEW-BAHT-TA it was brought to our attention that Audrey's classmates were playing Starwars during recess.   I'll spare all the details, but digging out my VHS tapes of the trilogy put the final nail in the coffin of 10 year old CRT TV.  Now we're watching Digitally remastered Starwars on a 42" LCD, having light sabre battles, and walking around with a colander on our head professing "Owen Wobot".   

Of all the horror movies, the zombie genre is definitely the one that you have to pay attention to.  In this day of constant war, political upheaval, economic disaster, and bird strikes, what says apocalypse better than chopping the head of your loved ones to keep from joining the legions of the undead?

Much to my wife's dismay I've started studying all of the zombie lore and am compiling a list of things that are nearly universally accepted as the zombie laws.   With this in hand you can at least have an idea of what you are going to be up against.

1. Zombies can be your mother, your brother, your drinking buddy, but they are no longer your friend.
2. They carry a virus that is spread by their bite.  The virus comes from outer space or more likely - the government.
3. They can only be stopped by dismantling their brain or severing their head from their body.
4. Zombies feast on human flesh and won't stop until they've consumed every last living human.
5. They have no emotion or feeling.  You can't reason with them or tame them (see Fido).

It's pretty much that simple.  There are rules that many tales hold in common. For instance, they move slowly and are easy targets.  However, more recent tomes such as I am Legend and 28 days later have surmised that they are much more agile than earlier seers have predicted. 

I hope that armed with this knowledge you won't panic when the dead break down your door.   In future segments I'll give you tips on survival.  Lets hope I get to write them before those well meaning scientists destroy our future.

Is it possible that we are ready now to see convergence of Internet and TV ?  Oh pretty please.  There are a couple of things that needed to happen before we could see this reality,  quality TVs that display computer screens in a quality format (1080p) were a must, web style advertising during shows which Intel is working hard on, and a willingness from broadcasters to allow consumers to view content at their convenience.   

The broadcasters are finally being dragged screaming and kicking online. CBS is the latest to join the fray with TV.com as a response to Hulu.com.  Netflix has been instrumental in moving the needle on Web based content with their willingness to partner with nearly any hardware provider including Roku, LG, and Xbox.   

Unfortunately as of late Netflix has consistently been giving me a network error and slowed to a crawl.  Hulu would do well to be more forthright about what 'new arrivals' means and to actively email me when they add content.  We've got a long way to go, but for the first time 'convergence' looks like science-fact not fiction.

Photo credit blakespot

I was watching the Giants collapse this weekend with some friends :-(  And the new Friday the 13th commercial came on.   A discussion ensued about horror films and I brought up that I only watch Zombie movies - that brought silence to an already depressed crowd.  Zombie movies ?  Like 28 days later ?  I guess that's OK.   So I found myself defending the genre.

Why Zombie movies ?  Because it could and probably will happen.   How easy is it to believe that the government - or big business will create some crazy ass virus and inject us all "for safety reasons".  Have you been to a casino lately ?  The invasion has already begun.  

What are the pillars of the horror industry ?  Vampires and Werewolves, sorry the aren't among us.   Psychopathic killers, CSI does too good of a job weekly for me to need the big screen. Creature Features, scientists  would carve them up before they got a chance to be a threat.  Supernatural Thrillers ? No, it's Zombie movies for me.   Simple plot, simple rules and quite the motivator to watch every move big pharma makes.

In the late 1990s I moved to Long Island from upstate New York.   In Ithaca I was very active outdoors with hiking and mountain biking.   It just wasn't the same walking the greenways next to the crowded motor parkways, so I decided I needed a hobby.   I thought it would be fun to collect old computers, but I quickly found out that collecting them took a lot of space and money, and after setting them up once, there wasn't much to do.   Some of first home computers doubled as video game consoles - collecting the media was more entertaining, but it was still very hard to find. While scouring garage sales and flea markets I kept coming across tons of media for true home video game consoles like the early Atari's and Nintendos and started collecting those. It was easy to fund the video game collection by selling repaired systems and duplicate game cartridges. 

With a simple website and the Internet. It was surprising simple to make sales using Search Engine Marketing, a brand new advertising method.  There was very little competition and AtariAce.Com quickly brought in sales.  For a couple years I mainly worked on the Atari 2600 and during the Christmas holiday it took all my free time to get systems up for sale.  One holiday my parents were in town and my father became very interested in the business, enough to start helping with Atari 2600 Systems.  Within 18 months my Dad was doing all of the Atari 2600s allowing me to collect and sell other systems including Nintendo, Sega, and Sony.

In 2007 I all but stopped collecting and selling Video Game systems as Crowd Fusion and my second child started to consume a tremendous amount of time, however every Christmas my father still gears up the advertising and the site for an Atari 2600 rush.   This past year it was hard to see any interest coming with this now 30 year old system and we were pretty sure that it was time to close up shop .. and then Lexus came along with this commercial.

Not only did sales start immediately but we sold a lot of Centipede as well.   I'm sure my father is struggling everyday with whether he should stock up on systems for next christmas, or accept that the risk / reward has become too high.  

Over the last 10 years I've built a large collection of vintage video games, systems and accessories.  I've built up some very nice pieces that could turn into a great traveling museum piece.   I haven't given up on adding to the collection, but I've definitely taken well deserved break as family and work have made demands.   I'm glad I have a hobby but most of all I'm glad that my father and I have been able to work on it together.